The thought that there had been winding tunnels under Rainbow Basin was a pipe dream at best. Okeria assured me he’d checked, double-checked, and triple checked all the land around and underneath the city when he was looking for Keratily’s things, but something brought him pause when I mentioned the message he’d sent. Almost like he couldn’t remember the contents of it, and when I mentioned all of Keratily’s crystals, he remembered for all of ten seconds. Something was wrong with him, and it had to be because of Keratily.

Still, he led us down into the cavern we’d taken shelter in before and gave us free reign to do whatever we needed. He seemed just as hopeful for Acasiana’s help as we were, though there was a barrier of cynicism between his hopes and his expectations that he hadn’t fully shown before. I smiled along and listened to everything he had to say, but he didn’t reveal anything we didn’t already learn from Nia’s inheritance.

“Well, here’s the place. If there’s anythin’ underground around here, it’s gonna be connected ta here.” Okeria finally said as he put his hands on his hips and surveyed the cavern. “If it’s actually as old as ya say it is, then the entire thing woulda been built under a massive reservoir, so either Acasiana swam down every time or there’s an entrance I haven’t caught sight of for as long as I’ve lived here.”

He swiped his hand through the air, and an overwhelming sensation of static electricity followed. All of our comms fizzled into uselessness, and even my armor seemed to grow a little weaker in the wake of whatever Okeria had just done.

“Alright, that’s safe talkin’ for here. I’ve done a bunch of geological surveys of the land ‘round here, but I ain’t found nothing like an underground building, nevermind multiple. It’d show as a wide empty space on my equipment, so either Acasiana did some terrifyin’ work and made security systems that’re still workin’ two millennia later, or we’re lookin’ for a teleporter.”

Either of those options sounded plausible to me. I tilted my head to Jun to ask her opinion, but she just answered with a shrug. Mortician didn’t have any ideas either, which they communicated by staring unerringly at Okeria through the entire thing.

I crossed my arms and tried to think if anything we’d seen in the hazard could help here. There was the pyramid I’d made, but I didn’t have any idea how to use it. Something about the hazards, for sure, but that wasn’t applicable for right now. Then there was the throne, which we’d returned to its glory by touching it, though I didn’t know how that could apply to this situation. The thing that seemed the most likely was the safe room, which was connected to a space it didn’t initially seem to, so maybe that held the key.

“Did you see anything strange at all?” I asked as I opened my map. “Maybe something wrong with the map? Or just a few little hiccups when you were scouting this place out?”

Okeria drummed his fingers against the bottom of his helmet. “Not that I can remember, but it’s been a good long while, and now ya know that my memory ain’t exactly perfect thanks ta Keratily. But I’ve got this thing on me, and it’ll show us if I’ve just been forgettin’ all this time.”

He summoned a device half his height and as wide as a telephone pole on the ground right before him. It looked like a pointed metal stake pressed to the ground surrounded by a dozen glowing glass devices, all of which were connected to it by thin wires wreathed in crackling electricity. Okeria tapped on it with his knuckles and the stake fell an inch into the ground, then began humming as loud as five bees on a sheet of thin plastic.

“Open your interfaces. I’ll transmit the data from this thing ta them.” Okeria said.

Jun swiped hers open before I’d even raised my hand. Mortician was a little slower than she was, and I was last since I’d watched them instead of opening my own. I swiped to my map screen and watched as a small pulse of electricity appeared on the center of it, quickly spreading out until it had enveloped my entire map. I zoomed out as far as I could, which brought it up to Rainbow Basin’s surface level, then zoomed in once more to show just the cavern we were in.

“What are we looking for?” Jun asked. She tried to zoom in even further than the cavern, but it stopped when it hit her location marker. “If there’s something underneath us, shouldn’t we be able to zoom in even further? Or at least swap to a lower map view.”

“I have no idea.” Okeria chuckled. He grabbed the stake and shifted it slightly to the left, then tapped his fingers against open air. “No geological anomalies so far. Everything’s smooth as smooth can be from here on down, which… wow, my brain must be for show. Nothing’s this smooth, especially not around here–I should’ve seen that the first time around.”

He slammed his fist against the top of the stake and rammed it even further into the ground. A pulse of static so intense it set my bones vibrating shot out from the tip and sent a deluge of text onto my screen, most of which I couldn’t read at all. But I didn’t need to. It was all a repetition of the same few things, on and on for a depth of close to a mile and a width of nearly three. Then it shifted to a mass of different things that I definitely couldn’t keep track of.

“Yup, there we go. A good chunk of ground that’s supposedly solid stone of exactly the same makeup. How come I didn’t notice this before?” He muttered, then shook his head. “Must be Keratily’s memory muddling. There’s no way I’d miss this if I was at my best, or even at my most middling.”

“What does all of this mean? Is there a facility inside of that space?” Mortician asked with curiosity.

Okeria stepped away from the device and gestured for Mortician to stand back. He summoned something else; a small cylinder that had been threaded like a screw. “I don’t know what’s inside of it. Just that it probably ain’t rock. This little doohicky will dig down and get us a sample of the stuff, just ta confirm that we ain’t chasin’ the shadows of doubt.”

The device fell to the ground, and as it did, the tip shaved down into a threaded molten silver tip. It touched the ground for a split second before electricity surged through it, and then it was gone. Burrowing through the ground at breakneck speeds while my interface told me the contents of the stuff it was digging through.

For the first few dozen feet, it was completely in line with what Okeria’s first device was telling me. A kind of stone I didn’t recognize from Earth, a few trace minerals, and a background radiation similar to the feeling I got from Keratily’s functions. It wasn’t stagnant, though; the levels changed ever so slightly, the stone’s density fluctuated in the smallest amounts, and the little drill caught on more than one stray root that had dug itself in deep.

Then… the drill stopped. Okeria let out a hum of concern and snapped his fingers, which reinvigorated the drill enough that I could hear it spinning through the hole it had bored, but it still didn’t move one inch. I double-checked my interface to see how far it had gotten before it hit the obstacle, and it had just barely passed over into the mass of similarity. Yet it still showed the diversity of the higher stone.

“It’s fake.” I said with certainty. “The facility’s down there.”

Okeria nodded in agreement. “That’s what the data looks like. Stand back, ya three. I’m gonna widen the hole.”

I barely had time to take two steps back when Okeria summoned a much, much larger version of the drill and let it fall onto the same hole. It screeched with electricity and sent up a storm of dust and debris as it drilled down into the rock, leaving a hole that I could’ve jumped down with my arms outstretched without touching either side. More data spilled down my interface, and it stopped at the exact same place as the little drill had.

“That has to be confirmation.” Jun said excitedly. “Can you tell what kind of facilities are down there?”

“Not without goin’ down to explore them ourselves.” Okeria said with a shake of his head. The big drill screeched against whatever was down there, and he dismissed the sound with another pulse of electricity. “Don’t forget to bend your knees.”